PowerXRM Blog

Capterra recently published a User Research survey on how users find, buy and use CRM. Key Takeaways:

More than half of users adopted a CRM within their company’s first five years in business, and 2/3 of companies had at least 100 customers when they first purchased a CRM.

One third of CRM users use Salesforce, while other software industry giants Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP combine with Salesforce to dominate 75% of the CRM market.

On average, businesses spend $150/user/month on their CRM. 61% spend over $50 per month per user.

Despite the growth of Social CRM people still want more, and the most desired CRM features were social media monitoring capabilities (25%) and the ability to pull in prospect information from social media (24%).

CRM software had the biggest impact on customer retention rates and customer satisfaction rates, according to respondents.

Conclusion:

Capterra’s CRM research shows how businesses are using their customer relationship management software to better measure their company’s performance, boost their sales and marketing efforts, and maintain loyalty among longtime customers. Users have also leveraged their CRM data to branch into new types of business software, such as marketing automation and social media monitoring. With widespread adoption and overall user satisfaction, the biggest growth opportunities in the CRM industry will be twofold:

New businesses will continue to adopt CRM technology as the economy continues to improve, and;

Current CRM vendors will upsell their users on add-ons and plug-ins to make better use of their CRM database, such as help desk software for customer service teams or marketing automation systems for marketers.